A usable SharePoint intranet for a 100–500 person Australian company typically costs $10,000 to $45,000 to build. The licence is already in your Microsoft 365 subscription — you are paying for design, structure and migration, not software. Where you land in that range depends far more on your content and your permissions than on how the home page looks.
What sits in each band
Most intranet projects for mid-size businesses fall into one of three bands. The bands overlap a little at the edges, and a good quote will tell you which one you are in and why.
| Band | Typical build | What you get | Usually suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $10,000–$14,000 | Home site, document, news and policy structure, working search, role-based permissions | Single-site business, first replacement for a shared drive |
| Professional | $16,000–$24,000 | Departmental sites on one template, project or client document sets, metadata, a few automated flows | Several departments, repeatable project or client work |
| Enterprise | $28,000–$45,000+ | Multi-entity or multi-site structure, line-of-business integration, migration with remediation, durable governance | Group structures, existing intranet to replace, regulated content |
Essential is a clean home site, a working structure for documents, news and policies, search that returns the right version, and permissions set by role. It suits a single-site business or a first move off a mapped network drive. Done well, it is the part of the intranet people actually use daily.
Professional adds departmental sites built from a consistent template, a document set structure that ships with every new project or client, metadata that makes search work properly, and a few automated flows around the content — a policy review reminder, a new-project site request. This is where most 150–300 person professional services and construction firms land.
Enterprise covers multi-entity or multi-site structures, integration with line-of-business systems, migration from an existing intranet with content remediation, and governance that survives staff turnover. The jump in price is mostly migration and integration work, not extra pages.
What you are actually paying for
Because there is no software to buy, the whole budget is people's time. It goes through roughly the same stages on every project, whatever the band.
- 01Discoveryhow your team finds documents today, who owns what
- 02Structure agreedsites, libraries, metadata and permissions signed off
- 03Buildsites, templates, navigation, search configuration
- 04Migrationmoving and cleaning the content worth keeping
- 05Training and handoverowners trained, documentation in your tenant
- 06Owners run itcontent kept current by the people who know it
The middle steps are visible, so they get the attention. The first and last steps decide whether the intranet is still used in two years. If a quote is light on discovery and handover, that is not a saving — it is where the project will be patched later. Everything is built in your own tenant, and you own it outright when the work ends.
What actually drives the number
It is rarely the page design. Cost is driven by four things.
How much content you are moving, and how much of it needs cleaning first. Moving a tidy, well-named library is quick. Moving a shared drive with fifteen years of "Final v3 (2)" files, broken links and personal folders is a project in itself. Most of the cost is deciding what not to move.
How many exceptions exist in your permission model. A model of "everyone reads, owners edit, finance and HR are private" is quick to build and easy to maintain. Every "except this folder, which only these four people can see" adds build time, testing time and future support. We cover the common traps in three SharePoint permission mistakes.
Whether the structure is agreed before build starts, or discovered during it. A structure agreed on paper costs a workshop. A structure discovered during build costs rework, because sites, libraries and metadata get rebuilt as people change their minds.
How many systems the intranet has to talk to. Pulling project lists from a job system, staff details from payroll or HR, or approvals into Teams each adds integration work and testing.
Example only: a 20-day build for a 200-person firm with four departments. Your split will depend on content and permissions.
Notice that migration and structure together outweigh the build of the sites themselves. That pattern holds in most projects: the visible part is the cheaper part.
Where the money gets wasted
Two patterns account for most overspend.
The first is migrating everything — including the large share nobody has opened in years. Every file moved has to be mapped, tagged, permissioned and checked. Archiving old content in place, read-only, and moving only what is current is usually the single biggest saving available.
The second is designing the structure around your org chart, which reorganises every eighteen months, instead of around the work, which does not. A project, a client, a policy and a site safety record keep their shape when the department above them is renamed. An intranet built around teams needs rebuilding after each restructure.
If you are quoted a number without anyone asking how your team currently looks for documents, that quote is a guess.
Costs that sit outside the build
A build quote should be the largest number, but not the only one. Budget honestly for these as well.
- Your own people's time. Someone has to decide what gets migrated and who owns each area. Expect department leads to give a few hours each during discovery and review.
- Content ownership after launch. An intranet with no named owners decays within a year. That cost is internal time, not a supplier invoice — but it is real.
- Ongoing support, if you want it. Some businesses run the intranet entirely in-house after handover. Others prefer a retainer for governance and small changes; ours start from $3,000 a month.
- Storage, occasionally. Most tenants have plenty of SharePoint storage. If you are migrating very large media or drawing archives, check your tenant allocation before assuming it is free.
How to read a quote
A fixed price is only as good as the scope behind it. Before you compare two numbers, check that they are pricing the same thing.
- The scope lists which sites, libraries and templates are included
- Migration volume is stated, with what is excluded or archived
- The permission model is described, not just "permissions configured"
- Discovery and sign-off of the structure happen before build
- Training and handover documentation are included
- Everything is built in your tenant and owned by you
- Change requests have a stated process and rate
When an intranet is not worth it
Honestly, sometimes it is not. A 50-person firm working out of one office, with a well-organised Teams setup and a single shared library, may get most of the benefit from a day of tidy-up and a clear naming convention. If nobody can name the problem an intranet would solve — documents that cannot be found, policies that are out of date, onboarding that relies on one person — wait until somebody can.
It is also worth checking why any previous attempt stalled before paying for another. The causes are usually about ownership rather than technology, which we cover in why your intranet failed.
The honest version
Ask for the scope in writing before the price. A fixed number attached to a vague scope is not certainty — it is risk priced in your supplier's favour.
What to do next
Start with an hour of your own time: list the five documents people most often ask for, and where each one lives today. If the answers are "it depends" or "ask Sarah", that list is your discovery brief. Bring it to any supplier and see whether their questions get sharper.
If you want a second opinion on scope before you go to quote, our SharePoint intranet service sets out how we structure a build, and the free diagnostic audit will tell you which band you are likely in before anyone puts a number on it.
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