{ "openapi": "3.0.1", "info": { "title": "Substack Scraper - posts, comments & authors", "description": "Scrape Substack newsletters at scale: full post archives with article text, comments, author profiles, and publication stats like subscriber counts. Works with any Substack URL or custom domain. Fast API-based scraping with no browser, pay per result. 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Leave empty only if you enable Discovery mode below.", "items": { "type": "object", "required": [ "url" ], "properties": { "url": { "type": "string", "title": "URL of a web page", "format": "uri" } } } }, "mode": { "title": "Scrape mode", "enum": [ "posts", "publication", "author" ], "type": "string", "description": "What to scrape for each publication URL. 'posts' = publication metadata + all posts in the archive. 'publication' = publication metadata only. Post and author URLs are always scraped as posts/authors regardless of this setting ('author' is accepted as an alias of 'publication').", "default": "posts" }, "maxPostsPerPublication": { "title": "Max posts per publication", "minimum": 0, "type": "integer", "description": "Limit the number of posts scraped per publication (lower = cheaper runs). Set 0 to scrape the ENTIRE archive — large publications can have thousands of posts. Leaving the field empty uses the default of 50.", "default": 50 }, "includeContent": { "title": "Include full post content", "type": "boolean", "description": "Fetch each post's full HTML + plain text body. Adds one request per post but gives you the actual article content.", "default": true }, "includeComments": { "title": "Include comments", "type": "boolean", "description": "Fetch the full comment thread for each post (adds one request per post). Note: every comment becomes a separate result in the dataset, and popular posts can have hundreds of comments.", "default": false }, "onlyFreePosts": { "title": "Only free posts", "type": "boolean", "description": "Skip paid/subscriber-only posts in publication archives (their bodies can't be fully scraped anyway). Post URLs given directly in Start URLs are always scraped.", "default": false }, "searchQuery": { "title": "Search query (optional)", "type": "string", "description": "Filter each publication archive by a search term. Only posts matching the term are scraped." }, "discoveryMode": { "title": "Discovery mode", "enum": [ "none", "leaderboard", "search" ], "type": "string", "description": "Auto-discover publications without providing URLs — seeds from 5 curated top publications and expands through each publication's /recommendations page until the limit below is hit. 'Search' additionally filters every discovered publication's archive by the Discovery query. Off by default: a discovery run scrapes MANY publications and produces a correspondingly large (and more expensive) dataset.", "default": "none" }, "discoveryQuery": { "title": "Discovery query", "type": "string", "description": "Used with 'Search' Discovery mode: keyword used to filter the archive of each discovered publication. Ignored otherwise." }, "maxPublicationsToDiscover": { "title": "Max publications to discover", "minimum": 1, "maximum": 500, "type": "integer", "description": "Cap on how many publications Discovery mode will feed into the scraper (the 5 seed publications count toward it; Start URLs do not). Lower = cheaper runs.", "default": 25 }, "maxConcurrency": { "title": "Max concurrency", "minimum": 1, "maximum": 25, "type": "integer", "description": "Parallel requests. Higher = faster runs; proxy rotation is handled automatically, but very aggressive settings can hit Substack rate limits.", "default": 5 } } }, "runsResponseSchema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "data": { "type": "object", "properties": { "id": { "type": "string" }, "actId": { "type": "string" }, "userId": { "type": "string" }, "startedAt": { "type": "string", "format": "date-time", "example": "2025-01-08T00:00:00.000Z" }, "finishedAt": { "type": "string", "format": "date-time", "example": "2025-01-08T00:00:00.000Z" }, "status": { "type": "string", "example": "READY" }, "meta": { "type": "object", "properties": { "origin": { "type": "string", "example": "API" }, "userAgent": { "type": "string" } } }, "stats": { "type": "object", "properties": { "inputBodyLen": { "type": "integer", "example": 2000 }, "rebootCount": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "restartCount": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "resurrectCount": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "computeUnits": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 } } }, "options": { "type": "object", "properties": { "build": { "type": "string", "example": "latest" }, "timeoutSecs": { "type": "integer", "example": 300 }, "memoryMbytes": { "type": "integer", "example": 1024 }, "diskMbytes": { "type": "integer", "example": 2048 } } }, "buildId": { "type": "string" }, "defaultKeyValueStoreId": { "type": "string" }, "defaultDatasetId": { "type": "string" }, "defaultRequestQueueId": { "type": "string" }, "buildNumber": { "type": "string", "example": "1.0.0" }, "containerUrl": { "type": "string" }, "usage": { "type": "object", "properties": { "ACTOR_COMPUTE_UNITS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATASET_READS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATASET_WRITES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "KEY_VALUE_STORE_READS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "KEY_VALUE_STORE_WRITES": { "type": "integer", "example": 1 }, "KEY_VALUE_STORE_LISTS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "REQUEST_QUEUE_READS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "REQUEST_QUEUE_WRITES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATA_TRANSFER_INTERNAL_GBYTES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATA_TRANSFER_EXTERNAL_GBYTES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "PROXY_RESIDENTIAL_TRANSFER_GBYTES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "PROXY_SERPS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 } } }, "usageTotalUsd": { "type": "number", "example": 0.00005 }, "usageUsd": { "type": "object", "properties": { "ACTOR_COMPUTE_UNITS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATASET_READS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATASET_WRITES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "KEY_VALUE_STORE_READS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "KEY_VALUE_STORE_WRITES": { "type": "number", "example": 0.00005 }, "KEY_VALUE_STORE_LISTS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "REQUEST_QUEUE_READS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "REQUEST_QUEUE_WRITES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATA_TRANSFER_INTERNAL_GBYTES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "DATA_TRANSFER_EXTERNAL_GBYTES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "PROXY_RESIDENTIAL_TRANSFER_GBYTES": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 }, "PROXY_SERPS": { "type": "integer", "example": 0 } } } } } } } } } }