Why Inkling
Why I'm building Inkling.
I'm Peter Van Dijck. I'm building Inkling because newsletters are where many experts write, and neither people nor AI agents can easily read them as a body of work.
The problem
Newsletters hold a lot of expert analysis, and it is hard to research as a body of work. Substack has no general public API for posts. RSS feeds help, but they do not promise a full archive. Reader apps like Readwise, Feedbin or Feedly only hold what you subscribe to, from the day you subscribe.
If you want an AI agent to read the back catalogue of a few hundred newsletters you have never subscribed to, you end up scraping, storing and maintaining it yourself, or paying for a monitoring platform built for a different job.
What Inkling is
Inkling is the archive, made simple. It holds the issues of nearly 18,000 public newsletters, nearly 2 million issues going back to 2000, updated hourly. You can find a newsletter by name, read its latest issue, and step back through every earlier one with the arrow keys. Your AI agent connects over MCP to do the same, and fetches any issue as markdown.
The data comes from Sputnik Intelligence, our sister product, which follows newsletters and podcasts for monitoring. Inkling is the simpler, cheaper door into the newsletter part.
Why you might use it
- You build with AI agents and want to give them newsletters to search and read.
- You track a space, and the experts in it write newsletters.
- You want to read what the top newsletters in a category say, in their own words.
- You want published prices: from $79 per month, with no sales call.
Why you might not
Inkling is new, and it does not try to be everything. There is no full-text search across issue text yet: you find newsletters by name. We do not have every newsletter, and we include free and public content only. If you need subscriber counts, contacts or keyword alerts, Reletter is built for that and starts cheaper. If you want to read your own subscriptions, a reader app is better. The comparison pages are honest about where each tool fits.
Who is behind it
Inkling is built by me, Peter Van Dijck, at Helpful Intelligence, in Madrid, Spain. Signups are closed while it is in early access. To ask for access, or to ask anything else, write to hello@inklingdata.com. It goes to me.
Ask for early access.
Inkling is in early access. Ask for access and we will get you in.