jsonfield
A Django model field for storing JSON, written in 2009, long before Django had one built in. It has about 51 million downloads on PyPI.
I wrote jsonfield in May 2009 so Django models could store ad-hoc JSON and handle serialization to and from the database. Django added a native JSONField eleven years later, in version 3.1 (2020).
I worked on it until 2017, including Python 3 support and native PostgreSQL JSON support in 2013, and I’m still its top contributor by commits. Other maintainers have looked after it since. It has about 51 million downloads on PyPI in total and still gets around 700,000 a month (October 2026).