How much does a SharePoint intranet cost?
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The platform is already paid for. If your organisation has Microsoft 365, SharePoint Online is included and you could publish a working intranet this afternoon at no additional licence cost. That is the single most useful fact about intranet budgets, and the one vendors are least keen to lead with.
What costs money is everything around it: information architecture, design, content migration, custom components, integrations, training and governance. In practice a project runs €5,000–20,000 for a small organisation, €20,000–80,000 for a mid-size one, and well into six figures for a large multinational with several languages and regulatory requirements.
Where those ranges go wrong is almost never the technology. It is scope: an intranet is one of the few projects where every department has an opinion and none of them owns the outcome.
Where the budget actually goes
| Line | Typical share | Can you reduce it? |
|---|---|---|
| Information architecture | 10–20% | Not really, and do not try. Getting the structure wrong is what makes intranets fail. |
| Design and branding | 15–25% | Yes — SharePoint's own theming gets you most of the way. |
| Content migration | 20–40% | Yes, dramatically, by migrating less. This is the single biggest lever in the table. |
| Custom components | 10–30% | Yes — see below. |
| Training and adoption | 10–15% | No. Underfunding this is the classic false economy. |
| Governance setup | 5–10% | No, but it is cheap relative to what it prevents. |
The row people underestimate is migration, and the reason is that it is not a technical task. Deciding what not to bring over is an organisational negotiation, and it is where the weeks go. The reliable saving is not a faster migration tool: it is agreeing a cut-off date and archiving the rest.
The custom components line
This is the line most under your control, because it is the one where the default assumption is usually wrong. An intranet project typically wants four to eight custom pieces: a directory, a request form or two, a dashboard, a document tracker, some news presentation.
Quoted as bespoke SPFx at €3,000–8,000 each, that is €12,000–60,000 — often more than the rest of the project put together, and it arrives with maintenance attached. The alternatives, in order of what to try:
- Built-in web parts and JSON list formatting. Free, and covers more than expected. Establish where it stops before paying for anything.
- A no-code platform. A flat tenant subscription regardless of component count, which turns a variable, per-component cost into a fixed one — see building SharePoint web parts without coding.
- Bespoke development, reserved for the one or two components that genuinely justify it — a real integration, unusual permission logic — rather than applied to all eight by default.
The costs that arrive after launch
Every intranet budget is written for the launch and lived after it. The recurring lines:
- Content ownership. Someone's actual job, or the intranet is stale within a year. This is the cost that decides whether the project succeeded.
- Custom component maintenance. Zero on native and no-code routes; unbounded on bespoke, because it follows Microsoft's release calendar and not yours.
- Third-party licences, if you bought an intranet-in-a-box product. Usually per user per month, and worth modelling at three years rather than one.
- Governance: permissions review, site sprawl, retention. Small, and skipping it is how you end up paying for a cleanup project later.
A useful discipline before signing anything: write the three-year total, not the project total. It changes which option wins surprisingly often, and it is the number your finance director was going to ask for anyway.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need extra licences for a SharePoint intranet?
No, for the intranet itself. SharePoint Online is included in the Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans, and publishing sites, pages, news, lists and libraries costs nothing extra. You may need additional licensing for specific add-ons: Power Apps premium connectors, Viva modules, or a third-party product — but none of those is required to have an intranet.
Is an intranet-in-a-box product cheaper than building it?
It depends entirely on headcount and horizon. Those products are typically priced per user per month, so they are attractive for a small organisation and can become the largest line in the budget for a large one. Model three years at your actual headcount and compare against a build. Also check what happens to your content if you stop paying.
How long does a SharePoint intranet take?
A small one, four to eight weeks. A mid-size one, three to six months. A large multi-language rollout, a year or more. The technical build is rarely the constraint — content, approvals and getting departments to agree are. If a proposal promises a large intranet in six weeks, ask what is being left out.
What is the cheapest credible version of this?
A communication site using SharePoint's own templates and theming, native web parts, lists with JSON formatting for anything table-shaped, and a strict rule that only current content migrates. That costs licence money you have already spent plus internal time, and it is a genuinely good intranet for a small organisation. Spend money only where you hit a wall you can name.