I have used connect a number of years ago. I think it may take a week or so to get approved. (relatively painless process) Once approved it took me maybe a week

I have used connect a number of years ago. I think it may take a week or so to get approved. (relatively painless process) Once approved it took me maybe a week to get the payment functionality working. I was a much lesser developer then as it was essentially one of my first forays into api's and web development. After approval a skilled developer could absolutely bang out the core functionality in a weekend. Using regular stripe for direct payments is even easier and you can have a fully functional payment system / shopping cart in a few hours. My above statements though in no way reduces what Patreon has done, they excelled at execution and driving traffic to their service as well as excellent usability. No small feat and not easily reproducible. Much the same as the way Facebook succeeded and myspace and friendster failed. Vision and incredible execution.