Three days on the Adriatic coast, six stages and a roster from Apple, NVIDIA and OpenAI, at a fraction of capital-city conference prices.
An annual three-day developer conference held in Zadar, Croatia, and the largest event of its kind in southeastern Europe. It is organised by Infobip, the Croatian communications API company, and covers artificial intelligence, developer tools, infrastructure, distributed systems, platform engineering, cloud and DevOps, APIs, data systems, security, system design and scaling. The 2026 edition runs six stages across five halls, with a dedicated startup track alongside the engineering programme.
13 to 15 September 2026. Kresimir Cosic Hall, Visnjik Sports Center, Splitska ulica 3, 23000 Zadar, Croatia. The three days are not three days of talks: 13 September is Day 0, given over to badge pickup, city experiences and informal gatherings, and the conference programme itself runs on 14 and 15 September. Tickets are sold as "2-Day Conference Access" for that reason, and the organiser does not sell single-day passes.
Infobip d.o.o., the Croatian cloud communications company, registered at Domovinskog rata 61, 21000 Split. Shift is not a conference Infobip founded: it began as the independent Shift Conference in Split and was acquired by Infobip in 2021, after which Shift founder Ivan Burazin joined Infobip as Chief Developer Experience Officer. The flagship edition then moved from Split to Zadar, where it has run annually since. Conference director Stipe Cigic sets the editorial line.
The official 2026 site states 4,000+ developers and 500+ companies, while Infobip reported 5,000+ attendees for the 2025 edition. The audience is developers and software engineers first, with DevOps and platform teams, founders, IT professionals and, through the startup track, investors. The organiser reported that attendance at a recent edition was 45 percent female (unverifiable information), with a stated target of 50 percent for 2026.
The official speakers page publishes the full roster, described by the organiser as 100+ speakers. Confirmed names include Benoit Schillings (VP of Technology, Google DeepMind), Katie Gamanji (Principal Engineer, Apple), Igor Dmochowski (Developer Relations Manager, NVIDIA), Luis Velasco (Forward Deployed Engineer, OpenAI), Dana Lawson (CTO, Netlify), Michelle Brenner (Senior Software Engineer, Netflix), Teresa Wu (VP Engineer, JP Morgan Chase), Rob Zuber (CTO, CircleCI), Hugo Raymond (Designer Advocate, Figma), Nico Martin (Open Source ML Engineer, Hugging Face), Daniel Maher (Senior Technical Advocate, Datadog), Chris Davidson (Lead Solutions Engineer, Atlassian), Florian Binswanger (Startup GTM Lead EMEA, Vercel), Florian Mair (Principal Software Engineer, Dynatrace), Harry Kimpel (Principal Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic), Kerem Duark (Solutions Architect, Databricks), Andrei Shakirin (Senior Solution Architect, AWS), Betta Lyon Delsordo (Penetration Testing Engineer, AWS), Ema Puljak (Research Scientist, CERN), Alex Shershebnev (Head of ML/DevOps, Zencoder), Amir Salihefendic (Founder and CEO, Todoist), Debbie O'Brien (Developer Educator), Josip Stuhli (CTO, Sofascore), Izabel Jelenic (CTO and co-founder, Infobip) and Sinisa Krajnovic (CEO, Ericsson Nikola Tesla). Rasmus Lerdorf, Hakon Wium Lie, Grace Francisco, Una Kravets, Rich Harris, Charity Majors and Kent C. Dodds appear on the site under "Past speakers" and are not on the 2026 roster.
Three changes against the 2025 edition. The dates move earlier, from 14 to 16 September in 2025 to 13 to 15 September in 2026. The startup track is formalised into named areas: a Startup Stage, a VC Corner for investor meetings, a Startup Expo and a main-stage pitching competition, and Shift 2026 hosts the final of Scale 2.0, an incubator programme for Croatian early-stage startups. The headline speaker count rises from 80+ advertised for 2025 to 100+ for 2026, although Infobip's own post-event report for 2025 claimed 115 speakers, which makes the comparison unreliable.
The programme is tagged across seven tracks: AI and Data, Cloud Development, Innovation and Business, Startup and Growth, People and Leadership, Frontend Development, and General. The organiser's stated themes for 2026 are AI tools, platform development, cloud infrastructure and developer career growth. Sessions run on eight named stages and rooms: Main Stage, Trough Stage, Crest Stage, Foam Stage, Swell Stage, Startup Stage, Workshop 1 and Workshop 2. Day 1 alone carries around thirty scheduled items. Conference director Stipe Cigic describes the selection rule as avoiding professional speakers, marketing-driven presentations and topics overloaded with buzzwords.
Four formats appear on the published agenda: talks of 30 to 60 minutes, workshops running 60 to 240 minutes, panel discussions, and fireside chats between two speakers. There is also an exhibition area, a Startup Expo and a main-stage pitching competition on the final day. Workshops are not included in every ticket: only the All Access Pass carries "2-Day Conference Workshops".
Six official side events are published, none of them included in a conference ticket, all requiring separate registration. On 13 September: CroAI Day 0 at Dnevni boravak, University of Zadar, from 18:00, free entry, with an "Indie Development in the Age of Vibe Coding" keynote and a "Generation Copilot" panel; and Infobip Shift x Sedmi Odjel at Maskovica Han in Vrana, with transport provided. On 14 September: Night Shift Day 1 afterparty at Opera Club, Zadar, 21:00 to 03:00, and a Walk With Bestie at Sportski centar Visnjik, capped at 20 people. On 15 September: a second Walk With Bestie, and the Night Shift Day 2 afterparty at Guma Bar, 21:00 to 03:00. Separately, the organiser sells paid Experiences around the conference: a Zadar gastro tour, two island boat trips (Dugi Otok and Sakarun, or Kornati National Park and Telascica), a walking tour, a wine bus tour, a sunset cruise and a craft brewery tour. Their prices are not published on the site; holders of three or more Standard Passes get 7 percent off.
Prices below are the Late Bird tier, live on the official site on 9 September 2026 and running until 15 September, after which a Final tier applies. Student Pass: 40 EUR plus VAT. Standard Pass: 303 EUR plus VAT. All Access Pass: 415 EUR plus VAT. All three include two days of conference access, multiple stages, the exhibition area, lunch and refreshments, the official after party and the networking app. The All Access Pass adds fast lane entry, two-day virtual conference access, the conference workshops and a 10 percent discount on the following year. The full price ladder was Blind Bird (to 16 December), Super Early Bird (to 16 February), Early Bird (to 23 May), Regular Bird (to 31 August), Late Bird (to 15 September) and Final. A group discount applies from three tickets. Tickets are sold through the official site and through the Croatian vendor Entrio.
Through an open call for proposals hosted on Sessionize. For the 2026 edition the call opened on 17 September 2025 and closed on 22 June 2026, so it is closed at the time of writing and the next window should be expected around September 2026 for the 2027 edition. The organiser asks for practical solutions and real use cases, fresh technical material and live coding, delivered in English, and states that it screens out professional speakers and marketing presentations. Travel, accommodation and speaker fees are not addressed on the call page.
Through a "Become a sponsor" form hosted on Airtable and linked from the official site footer. No sponsorship packages, tier names or prices are published. Founders have a separate route: the Infobip Startup Tribe offers free tickets for a founder and team plus access to the VC Corner and the chance to apply for a Startup Expo booth, in exchange for joining the programme. A media kit with logos and brand colours sits in the newsroom for approved partners.
Two things need separating here. Infobip is the organiser, and it also appears first on its own sponsor wall, so its presence there is not third-party endorsement. The genuinely external sponsors, listed without tier labels, are: Infinum, AWS, Sedmi Odjel, Abysalto, Comsysto Reply, Raiffeisenbank, ReversingLabs, Fortuna Entertainment Group, Apryse, Exoscale, Codeplain, Aleph Holding, Laqo, Conet, Gideon, KING ICT, Laus, Duetto, TPS, Fina, JetBrains, Sofascore, Torus3D, HBOR, Datadog, Confiva, Netlify, Atlassian and Sonder AI, with Cetina as official hydration sponsor. Beyond those, the site publishes five further categories that are not conference sponsorship in the commercial sense: media partners (ShiftMag (media partner), Netokracija (media partner), DevITjobs (media partner), RTL (media partner), Voyo (media partner)), interior partners (Wespa, Cernelic), a coffee partner (Caffe Monte), an automotive partner (Toyota), food and beverage partners (Volim Ljuto, Filir, Kabola, Roxanich, Aura, Carlsberg Croatia, Somersby, Elephant Pretzels, Pipi) and around two dozen community partners including CroAI, EESTEC, Split Tech City, Endeavor, GDG Zagreb and the University of Zadar. The site also shows a separate wall of previous sponsors, including GitHub, Docker, GitLab, Mozilla, Shopify, Elastic, HashiCorp, Microsoft, Sentry and Google Cloud, which are not 2026 sponsors.
The organiser publishes a company count, 500+ for 2026 and 600+ for 2025, but no breakdown by size, sector or country, so no majority can be established from published data. What the sponsor and speaker lists do show is the mix: global engineering employers (Apple, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Netflix, AWS, Atlassian, Datadog, JetBrains, Netlify, Vercel, Databricks), Croatian and regional software companies (Infinum, Abysalto, Sofascore, ReversingLabs, KING ICT, Ericsson Nikola Tesla, Duetto), Croatian banking and public finance (Raiffeisenbank, Fina, HBOR), and early-stage startups arriving through the startup track and the Scale 2.0 final.
Through the media inquiry form in the Shift newsroom, an Airtable form; no named press officer or dedicated press email is published, and general enquiries go to shift@infobip.com. The organiser states that Shift welcomes journalists from across the world to cover the whole event free of charge, and the FAQ adds that all journalists from legitimate media outlets can get a media pass. Interviews are booked through the event app and held in a press corner. No accreditation deadline is published.
Most of the traceable coverage of the 2026 edition comes from outlets that appear on Shift's own media partner wall. ShiftMag (media partner), the developer publication Infobip launched and funds, ran the announcement piece framing the edition around Apple and NVIDIA on stage. Netokracija (media partner), RTL (media partner), Voyo (media partner) and DevITjobs (media partner) complete the published media partner list. Infobip's own newsroom and developer blog carry the announcement and the post-event reports. Independent trade coverage of the 2026 edition was not found in the sourced material.
Weak as independent evidence, on three of the four levels used in this index. Placed coverage: ShiftMag (media partner) is owned and funded by the organiser, and although it states that it keeps editorial independence and is technologically agnostic, it is not an outside check on the organiser's claims; Netokracija (media partner), RTL (media partner), Voyo (media partner) and DevITjobs (media partner) are on a partner wall, not commissioned by a newsroom. Organiser-claimed coverage: Infobip's newsroom and developer blog are corporate communications. Predictable but unconfirmed: a journalist attending on a free media pass is not a commitment to publish. Genuinely independent coverage: none found for the 2026 edition. The practical consequence is that every scale figure in this fiche traces back to Infobip.
Because nobody outside the organiser counts, and the organiser's channels do not agree with each other. For the 2025 edition, Infobip's press release said more than 5,000 attendees and over 115 speakers from 50 countries; its developer blog said more than 5,500 developers; ShiftMag (media partner) said 5,500 attendees from 40 countries; and the archived 2025 site still shows 4,000+ and 80+ speakers. The 2026 site now advertises 4,000+ developers and 100+ speakers, a lower attendance figure than the one claimed for the year before. The Responsibility page compounds it, quoting a 2024 diversity effort, an unnamed "last year" attendance of 45 percent female and a speaker base of 80 in the same breath. None of this means the conference is small: it means the numbers are marketing copy of uneven vintage, and a reader should treat every count on this page as an organiser figure that has never been audited.
The venue is a sports arena of more than 15,000 square metres in a mid-sized coastal city, not a convention centre in a capital. That single choice explains the price ladder, which tops out at 415 EUR plus VAT for the pass that includes workshops and virtual access, and it explains the six official Experiences the organiser sells around the conference, from island boat trips to a brewery tour. It also explains the draw: a speaker list running from Apple, NVIDIA and OpenAI to CERN and Hugging Face does not usually gather in a city of this size, and for engineers in Central and Eastern Europe this is the nearest event of that weight.
Because the conference was bought, not built. Shift existed as an independent Split conference before Infobip acquired it in 2021, and the editorial line survived the acquisition: the published tracks are AI and Data, Cloud Development, Frontend, People and Leadership, Startup and Growth, none of them named after the organiser's API business, and the stated selection rule rejects marketing-driven presentations. Infobip's return is developer goodwill and recruiting reach, not a product showcase, which is why the sponsor wall reads as an industry gathering rather than a user conference.
Anyone who needs a single-day visit: the organiser does not sell day tickets, and the two conference days are 14 and 15 September, so a useful trip is at least three nights on the Dalmatian coast. Speakers looking for a 2026 slot should also skip it, the call closed on 22 June 2026. Buyers who need a documented audience profile, by company size, seniority or country, will not find one: the organiser publishes a company count and nothing behind it. Enterprise buyers hunting a large vendor exhibition should look elsewhere too, the floor here is an exhibition area and a startup expo, not a trade show.
In the mid-September slot, at the start of the autumn developer season, and it is the anchor event for southeastern Europe rather than a competitor to the large pan-European conferences. It shares its window with the Nordic and Benelux practitioner conferences of the same season, and it differs from them on geography and price rather than on subject matter. Events Index tracks it in the developer and AI vertical. No sourced attendance comparison against those events is available here, since only organiser figures exist on either side.
Yes, three strands. Infobip Shift America ran in Miami at the Perez Art Museum from 5 to 7 May 2025. Infobip Shift Asia debuted in Kuala Lumpur on 4 November 2025 at JioSpace in Petaling Jaya, run with the Malaysian startup agency Cradle. The site also archives earlier brand variants, Shift Dev, Shift Money, Shift AI and Shift Remote, which are not currently running as separate events. Zadar is the flagship. Dates for the next American and Asian editions are not announced on the site as of 9 September 2026.
English. The call for proposals requires talks to be delivered in English, and the site, agenda and ticketing are published in English only, despite the Croatian venue.
Partly. Two-day virtual conference access is bundled into the All Access Pass at 415 EUR plus VAT, and into that pass only: the Student and Standard passes are in-person. The organiser publishes no standalone virtual ticket, and no policy on session recordings or on-demand replay after the event appears on the site, so post-event access should not be assumed.
Fourteen days to cancel, then nothing. The terms give a 14-day cooling-off period from purchase, during which a written cancellation is refunded to the original payment method minus a 10 EUR or 10 USD transaction fee; after that period all ticket purchases are non-refundable in full. Processing fees on free and subsidised tickets are never refunded. Resale is forbidden and voids the ticket. A name change on a Standard ticket may be granted at the organiser's discretion if requested at least 7 days before the event; day ticket holders cannot change names. If the organiser postpones or cancels, liability is capped at the fees paid minus processing charges, with no cover for travel or accommodation. Volunteers selected after buying a ticket are not refunded.
Partly documented. The FAQ states that all floors and halls of Shift are wheelchair accessible, and the organiser's Responsibility page adds that all areas of the venue were wheelchair accessible at a previous edition, with vegan and meat menus both provided. There is free parking at the venue. Nothing is published on sign language interpretation, live captioning, quiet rooms, assistance dogs or a contact for access requests, and no accessibility statement exists as a document.
The venue is the Kresimir Cosic Hall in the Visnjik Sports Center, Splitska ulica 3, 23000 Zadar, a domed arena of more than 15,000 square metres that is a Zadar landmark. The organiser names Zadar Airport as the closest airport, and recommends taxis, Uber or Bolt from the city; there is free parking at the venue for those driving. Badges can be collected at the venue the day before the conference as well as during it, which the organiser recommends to avoid the morning queue. Accommodation is not included in any ticket and the organiser points attendees to the Zadar tourism site rather than to a partner hotel list.
Official site: shift.infobip.com, with the agenda at shift.infobip.com/agenda/, the roster at shift.infobip.com/speakers/, side events at shift.infobip.com/side-events/, the FAQ at shift.infobip.com/faq/, terms at shift.infobip.com/terms-and-conditions/ and press materials at shift.infobip.com/newsroom/. The call for proposals lives on Sessionize, tickets also on Entrio. General and commercial enquiries: shift@infobip.com. Social accounts are published under InfobipShift on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr. Note that the address shown in the site footer, Domovinskog rata 61 in Split, is Infobip's registered office, not the conference venue.