Information architecture
The audience map, site hierarchy, hub associations, and navigation. A day of structure decisions saves weeks of rework, and getting it wrong is the most expensive mistake available.
SharePoint intranet cost
What drives SharePoint intranet cost — and how to get a number you can budget
An intranet is priced by scope, not by headcount: how many sites and hubs launch, how much existing content moves with them, how far the design goes beyond a theme, and how much governance has to be in place on day one. This page breaks those drivers down honestly, then shows how a fixed-fee build turns them into one written price from senior US-based engineers — typical delivery 2–4 weeks, 30 days of hypercare included.
Representative dashboard — sample data
Where the effort goes
Six areas carry almost all of the work
Provisioning sites takes minutes. Everything below is what a real quote is actually pricing, and it is why two proposals for “an intranet” can look nothing alike.
Content migration
Inventory, keep-or-archive decisions, metadata, and staged waves. This is the line item that most often doubles a budget, and the one vague quotes tend to leave out.
Branding and design
A theme, logo, and header treatment inside SharePoint's own design system is quick. Pixel-matching an external brand guide with custom layouts is a different project entirely.
Permissions and governance
Group-based access, a provisioning process, naming standards, and retention. Cheap to set up at launch, expensive to retrofit after three years of one-off exceptions.
Integrations
Viva Connections in Teams, a forms-and-approvals layer, or embedded reporting. Each one is a discrete, scopeable addition rather than a mystery percentage on top.
Training and hypercare
Site-owner training, a launch plan, and documentation your team keeps. Thirty days of hypercare after handover is included here, not billed as an extra support tier.
How it works
Three steps from a rough idea to a fixed number
- 1
Free consultation
We walk through what the intranet has to do on day one, how many audiences it serves, what content exists today, and where it lives. No obligation and no meter running.
- 2
Written scope and one price
You get the site plan, the migration boundary, the branding level, the governance model, a delivery window, and a single fixed fee. Nothing starts until you approve it.
- 3
Build, launch, hand over
Senior US-based engineers build to that scope, train your site owners, hand over documentation in your own tenant, and stay on for 30 days of included hypercare.
Why two quotes for the same intranet look nothing alike
Ask three firms to price an intranet and the spread will be wide enough to make you suspicious of all three. The usual explanation is not that one is greedy and one is cheap: they are quoting different projects. One is pricing a home site, a news framework, and department hubs on the platform's own building blocks. Another has assumed bulk file migration, a custom-branded home page, and a governance program. A third is an intranet product vendor quoting a per-user subscription for their software layered on top of the SharePoint you already own. Comparing those headline numbers tells you almost nothing; comparing their deliverable lists tells you everything.
It helps to remember what is already paid for. SharePoint Online is the intranet platform inside Microsoft 365 — Microsoft's SharePoint documentation (opens in new tab) covers what the service does out of the box — and for most teams the licenses are already on the bill. What you are buying from a consultancy is judgement and delivery: the structure, the migration, the permissions model, and the content that turns a blank canvas into something staff use. Any quote that reads like a software purchase deserves a second look.
The drivers, one at a time
Five or six variables explain nearly all of the difference between a lean launch and a heavy one. The table below is the checklist we take into a scoping call, and it is written so you can use it against anyone's proposal, not just ours.
| Driver | Keeps the number down | Pushes the number up |
|---|---|---|
| Size and shape of the site | One home site, a news framework, and four to six department hubs agreed before kickoff | Dozens of sites, multiple audiences with different navigation, regional or multilingual variants |
| Content migration volume | A defined set of current documents, or no migration at all in phase one | A decade of shared drives, unknown ownership, duplicate content, and no archive decision made |
| Content authoring | Your department owners write and approve their own pages to a supplied template | Someone else has to interview staff, write policy pages, and chase sign-off |
| Branding and design | Site theme, logo, header, and layouts from SharePoint's own design system | Pixel-matching an external brand guide, custom web parts, bespoke page layouts |
| Permissions and governance | Group-based access mapped to existing Microsoft 365 groups you already trust | Untangling years of individual exceptions, external sharing clean-up, retention and audit requirements |
| Integrations | Viva Connections in Teams and the standard web parts | Forms, approval workflows, line-of-business system lookups, embedded reporting |
| Rollout and training | A launch announcement plus one site-owner session and written documentation | Role-based training across departments, a champions program, staged change management |
Content is the row to watch. Structure and branding are decisions; content is labour, and it is where a four-week plan quietly turns into a three-month one. Our guide to what a SharePoint intranet in 30 days really looks like sets out exactly what fits inside a first month and what does not, which is the fastest way to sanity-check any scope you are handed. If existing files are moving too, the file server to SharePoint migration playbook covers the inventory and wave planning that belong in their own line item, and content sitting in Dropbox is a separate migration again.
Licensing sits underneath the build, not inside it
Two different budgets get confused here. The build is a one-time project fee. Licensing is a recurring per-user charge that continues whether or not you ever hire anyone: SharePoint Online is part of the Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans, and the core Viva Connections experience that puts the intranet inside Teams is included with those plans too — see Microsoft's Viva Connections overview (opens in new tab) for what the standard experience covers. Current per-user rates are published by Microsoft and change from time to time, so price them against your actual plan rather than against a figure in an article.
The trap is the third budget nobody mentions: a third-party intranet product with its own per-user subscription, sitting on top of the SharePoint licenses you are already paying for. Sometimes that is the right answer. Often it is a recurring cost for templates and a page builder, and it is worth asking what specifically it does that the platform does not.
How a fixed fee turns those drivers into one number
Every driver above is a scoping question, which is why we answer them before quoting rather than after. The phases below are what a typical build looks like; the fee column stays honest deliberately, because a number produced before anyone has seen your content inventory is a placeholder, not a price. How our fixed-fee process works explains the same structure across every engagement.
| Phase | Scope | Typical timeline | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 — Discovery and architecture | Audience map, site and hub hierarchy, navigation in plain language, permissions model, branding level agreed, content inventory and the migration boundary | About 1 week | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
| Phase 2 — Build and content | Home site, hub associations, department sites, news framework, search and metadata, theme applied, priority pages and the policies library loaded, Viva Connections configured in Teams | 1–2 weeks | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
| Phase 3 — Launch, training, hypercare | Pilot feedback applied, site owners trained, staged rollout and launch announcement, admin documentation handed over, then 30 days of included hypercare | About 1 week, plus 30 days of hypercare | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
Three habits protect the budget more than any negotiation. Insist on a written scope that names the sites, the migration boundary, the branding level, and the training before work begins, so overruns belong to the vendor rather than to you. Compare deliverable lists instead of headline numbers, because the cheapest proposal is usually the one that quietly excluded migration. And confirm in writing that everything is built in your own tenant and stays yours.
What you can do before anyone quotes
Three pieces of preparation reliably shrink the effort a consultant has to price. Decide the top-level navigation — seven links or fewer, in the words your staff already use. Name one person per department who can approve content and answer questions inside a day. And make the archive decision on your existing files before an inventory forces it, because deciding what does not move is cheaper than moving it.
The usual fit for this work is an organization of roughly 20 to 500 people already paying for Microsoft 365, running an intranet nobody reads or none at all, and needing a launch date it can actually commit to. It is delivered by senior US-based engineers from our Orange County, CA base and remotely across all US states, as one fixed-fee project with a stated end date. If you want the full engagement rather than the budgeting view, our SharePoint intranet and document management consulting page covers what a build includes end to end.
Related services
Next steps once you have a budget
SharePoint Consulting
The full build: information architecture, document libraries with metadata, a permissions model, migration, and governance that survives handover.
Intranet in 30 Days
The week-by-week plan, the exit criteria for each week, and an honest list of what does not fit inside a first month.
How It Works
The scoping conversation, the written fixed fee, the delivery window, and the 30 days of hypercare, explained step by step.
FAQ
Budget questions, answered plainly
Because the same words describe very different projects. A home site with four department hubs and no migration is not the project that moves a decade of shared drives and rebuilds permissions. Any number published before someone has seen your content and your structure is a guess you would end up correcting through change orders.
Content, almost always. Migrating and reorganizing existing files, then writing the pages people actually read, consumes more effort than provisioning sites ever does. Structure and branding are usually a week of decisions. Content is where a four-week build quietly becomes a three-month one if nobody owns it.
Usually not a new one. SharePoint Online is part of the Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans most teams already pay for, and the core Viva Connections experience in Teams is included with those plans. Licensing is per user and published by Microsoft, so check your current plan before budgeting anything extra.
Yes, in two specific places. Deciding your navigation and site structure before kickoff removes the slowest part of discovery, and having your own people write or clean up page content removes a large block of build effort. Both are scoped out of the fee explicitly rather than assumed.
The agreed fee does not move on its own. Work inside the written scope is covered however long it takes, which is the point of a fixed fee. Anything genuinely new, such as an extra hub or a migration wave nobody planned, is quoted separately and only starts once you approve it.
Your Microsoft 365 licensing continues, and most teams budget occasional change work as the intranet grows. There is no mandatory retainer here. Thirty days of hypercare is included after handover, and because the site is documented and sits in your tenant, your own staff can run it from there.
Book a free consultation
Get more from the Microsoft tools you already pay for
Tell us what you’re trying to fix — a report, an approval process, an intranet, a Copilot rollout. We scope it as a fixed-fee project, you approve, and a senior engineer delivers in 2–4 weeks.
- Fixed-fee scope agreed before any work starts
- Senior, US-based Microsoft engineers — no handoffs
- Typical 2–4 week delivery
- 30 days of post-delivery hypercare included
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we’ll reply within one business day.