How to Scrape Substack Newsletters in 2026: A Complete Guide

Part 1: Planning Your Scraping Project Before you write a single line of code, answer these questions: 1. What exactly are you scraping? Specific fields (titles, dates, URLs, content)? How many pages/items initially? How many over 3 months? Is the data structured (JSON API) or unstructured (HTML)? 2. What's the target site's ToS and robots.txt? Some sites explicitly forbid scraping. Respect that. Check yoursite.com/robots.txt and the Terms of Service. If they offer an API, use it—it's always better than scraping. 3. What are the scale requirements? 100 items/week? Use a simple hourly cron job. 100,000 items/week? You need rate limiting, rotating proxies, and distributed workers. Millions? Consider managed platforms like Apify or hiring a specialist. 4. Where will you store the data? JSON files for quick prototypes CSV for spreadsheet analysis PostgreSQL/MongoDB for queryable datasets S3 for long-term archival 5. How will you handle failures? What happens if the site changes its HTML st