requests

Requests is the library that makes it not painful. Python's built-in urllib works but reads like a punishment. Requests gives you `requests.get(url)` and you're done. It handles sessions, cookies, authentication, file uploads, redirects, and SSL verification with an API so clean it became the template for how Python libraries should be designed.

Fully free under Apache 2.0. It's one of the most downloaded Python packages in existence, over 300 million downloads per month. No paid tier, no hosted anything. Install it and use it.

The catch: requests is synchronous. If you're making hundreds of concurrent API calls, it blocks. For async HTTP, use httpx (which has an API almost identical to requests but supports async/await). requests also doesn't support HTTP/2. For most use cases, neither limitation matters. But if performance is critical, httpx is the modern successor that does everything requests does plus async and HTTP/2.