Currently the account keys are kept together with our founders themselves (im not privy to their key storage policy as im sure they have one)
I'm not sure right now if we have plans to be active on Hive again, maybe yes maybe no as the decision is no longer to be made by myself.
On the subject of CoinGecko API, at this point from what I know is that the free calls are still there though the challenges you faced were likely the result of our servers very tight anti-spam controls, not saying that you were the one spamming but you know how its like when some websites gets to strict with their cloudfare and we all have to be clicking on images even though we're perfectly human.
If you're using it once per week i'd say it should be no problem at all and yes you're right no point paying (paying gets you hundreds of calls per minute at least so its totally not suitable for your usecase).
it is likely the free api endpoint servers are being capped in throughout and you just happened to be calling when there is an instance of bot spams (we get too much of those now) where the endpoint controls becomes super tight. maybe try to set to call 1 minute after each failed calls to see if your script can succeed in the next try?
RE: CoinGecko is now 10 years old