requests

Requests is how most Python code talks to the web. Python's built-in urllib works but reads like a punishment; Requests gives you requests.get(url) and a response that parses its own JSON. Sessions, cookies, auth, file uploads, redirects, proxies and TLS verification are handled for you. Free under Apache 2.0.

pip install requests and you're done. There's nothing to host and no paid tier, so it's free for a solo script or a hundred-person team. It's still on 2.x (2.34 shipped in May 2026) and there's no 3.0 coming: the maintainers call it feature-complete and keep it in a perpetual feature freeze. Recent releases are maintenance, plus built-in type hints in 2.34. Needs Python 3.10 or newer.

The catch: it's synchronous and HTTP/1.1 only. Fire off hundreds of concurrent API calls and each one waits its turn. For async work, look at aiohttp, httpx (requests-style API with async and HTTP/2, though it hasn't shipped a release since December 2024) or Niquests, a drop-in fork that adds async, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. For scripts, CLIs and ordinary backend calls, Requests is still the right default.