Retrieve a Substack publication's posts programmatically without an official API
domain: substack.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Confirm there is no official public Substack API for posts, subscribers, or comments as of 2026 -- Substack does not publish or support one.
Fetch the publication's built-in RSS feed at https://{publication}.substack.com/feed, which every Substack newsletter exposes automatically.
Parse the feed's content field for full free-post content; paid-post entries in the public feed only include preview/teaser text.
Expect the feed to update within minutes of a new post publishing, making it a reasonably fresh polling source.
For anything beyond post text (subscriber counts, comments, analytics), there is no public programmatic path -- that data is only visible in the publisher's own dashboard.
Known gotchas
Do not represent the RSS feed as an 'API' to end users -- it is a read-only content syndication feed with no write capability or engagement data.
Full paid-subscriber-only content is not retrievable from the public feed URL; it requires an authenticated session tied to a paying subscriber.
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