Platform Intelligence

Substack

Substack reaches millions of readers and supports more than 5 million paid subscriptions across newsletters, essays, podcasts, and video, making it important for thought leadership, owned audiences, and direct-to-reader revenue.

Substack

Why Substack research matters

Substack has become a core platform for independent writers, analysts, investors, policy voices, and subject-matter experts. Its reach is different from mass social networks: smaller in raw scale, but often much higher in intent, loyalty, and willingness to pay for expertise.

What Problem Does It Solve?

Newsletter ecosystems are difficult to monitor if you only track general web mentions. Teams need creator discovery, post search, feed analysis, and reader interaction context to understand who is publishing, what themes are rising, and how audience communities are responding.

Who Is It For?

Creator economy teams, media researchers, and newsletter-focused intelligence products.
Investors, policy teams, and analysts tracking expert commentary and niche publication ecosystems.
App developers building discovery, recommendation, or creator-monitoring workflows.
AI teams assisting writers, editors, and research users who rely on newsletter-driven expertise.

Key Benefits

Search people, posts, and top results while also retrieving profile, feed, activity, and reader-interaction data.
Support creator discovery, newsletter benchmarking, and theme monitoring in a subscription-first ecosystem.
Capture not just publication output, but reader posts and comment-oriented response patterns.
Use API, MCP, and web app access for applications, analysts, and AI systems.
Turn a fragmented newsletter landscape into a searchable research surface.

Use Cases

Find emerging writers and compare publication themes and output cadence.
Monitor expert newsletters in areas such as finance, politics, technology, media, and health.
Track how readers respond to a publication through comments and reader-post interactions.
Let AI agents compile newsletter briefs, creator maps, or topic roundups.

How It Works

Choose whether the workflow starts with people search, post search, top search, feed retrieval, or profile analysis.
Retrieve posts, profile data, and activity context, then add reader comments or reader posts when audience response matters.
Deliver the results into creator dashboards, media research tools, or AI workflows.

AI and MCP Workflows

Use MCP so AI agents can gather expert newsletters and creator context before generating briefings or reading lists.
Combine Substack retrieval with web, social, and news data for richer expert monitoring.
Automate newsletter intelligence for editors, investors, and research teams.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why use Substack data separately from general web search? Because newsletters, writers, audience loyalty, and reader interactions form a distinct ecosystem that is easy to miss in generic search.
Who benefits most from this product? Teams tracking experts, independent media, paid newsletters, and creator ecosystems.
Can AI agents build topic briefings from Substack data? Yes. MCP access is well suited to that use case.

Getting Started

Start by deciding whether you need creator discovery, post-level search, publication monitoring, or reader-response analysis. Then route the right Substack endpoints into your app or agent workflow instead of treating newsletters like generic web pages. API, MCP, and web app access are included. Usage is billed by request tier. For continuous creator and publication tracking, the annual plan is the better option because you pay for only 10 months and get 12 months of access, which gives you 2 months free.

Pricing

Pricing

Simple per-result pricing - one credit per result delivered.

Tier Credits Price Overage Cost Action
Micro 200
CAD 60/mo
CAD 0.36/credit
Starter 1,000
CAD 240/mo
CAD 0.29/credit
Business 4,000
CAD 600/mo
CAD 0.18/credit
Enterprise 20,000
CAD 1,800/mo
CAD 0.11/credit
Pricing Explanation

Pricing Explanation

Simple per-result pricing - one credit per result delivered.

How Pricing Works

Credit Usage

Per Result:1 credit

Simple and straightforward - each result delivered consumes one credit from your monthly allowance.

How It Works

  • Each plan includes a monthly credit allowance
  • One credit is used for each result delivered
  • Unused credits do not roll over to the next month
  • Track your usage in real-time through your dashboard

Plan Features Comparison

FeatureMicroStarterBusinessEnterprise
Number of Queries131030
Email Recipients1520100
Webhooks131020
Portfolio Companies11040200