Substack Scraper MCP Server

Substack Scraper MCP Server

An MCP server for the Mamba Labs Substack Scraper actor on Apify. Give it Substack publications or keywords. It returns publication profiles and posts as flat rows.

What's Inside

• What it does
• Quick start
• Prerequisites
• Example prompts
• Tool
• Inputs
• Pricing
• Your keys
• Full actor documentation
• License

What it does

• Publications: name, author, tagline, subscriber count as Substack shows it (subscriber_count_text, and subscriber_count_min as a number), subscriber tier text, and monthly, yearly, and founding plan prices.
• Posts: title, URL, date, audience (free, paid, or founding), likes, comments, restacks, word count, bylines, and tags. Optional post text with include_body.
• Search: keyword search across Substack posts, returned as posts or as the publications behind them.

All of the work runs on Apify. This package is a thin client that starts the actor run, waits for it, and hands back the dataset rows.

Quick start

You need Node.js 18 or newer and an Apify account with an API token.

Add this to your Claude Desktop config (claude_desktop_config.json), Cursor, or any MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mamba-substack-scraper": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@mambalabsdev/mcp-substack-scraper"
      ],
      "env": {
        "APIFY_TOKEN": "your-apify-token"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart the client. The scrape_substack tool appears.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18 or newer.
• An Apify API token from console.apify.com/account/integrations, set as APIFY_TOKEN. The server lists its tool without a token; a call needs one.

Example prompts

• "How many subscribers does Lenny's Newsletter have, and what does a paid plan cost?"
• "Find Substack newsletters that write about cold email and list their subscriber counts."
• "What did notboring.co publish in the last 30 days, and which posts were paid only?"

Tool

scrape_substack. One tool. Example arguments:

{
  "publications": [
    "lenny.substack.com"
  ],
  "search_queries": [
    "cold email"
  ],
  "max_posts_per_publication": "5",
  "max_search_results": "5"
}

Inputs

Every buyer facing input of the actor, unchanged. Omitted inputs take the actor's own defaults. Numbers and booleans are sent as strings.

Pricing

Pay per event on Apify, billed to your Apify account. Prices in USD.

no_results and error rows are free, including the one row a refused input returns.

Your keys

The actor needs no key. It reads Substack's public pages and public JSON routes and holds no key of any kind. Proxy traffic adds nothing to your price: Mamba Labs pays the platform costs of the run.

Full actor documentation

apify.com/mambalabs/substack-scraper

License

MIT. See LICENSE.