How to get into Web Summit without paying €995 for a ticket
Web Summit runs at Lisbon's MEO Arena from 9 to 12 November. A general pass is €995, but the organisers' own volunteer programme hands out free tickets to people willing to work the floor, with access to the talks on time off.
There are two ways to be inside the MEO Arena in November. One of them costs €995.
Web Summit is back in Lisbon from 9 to 12 November, and the price list is already up. A general attendee pass sits at €995, marked down from a list price of €1,595. VIP is €1,950. At the top there is a Chairperson ticket at €24,950, which buys meeting space, fast-tracked entry and the speaker lounge — twenty-five general tickets, for the same four days.
The second way costs nothing, and it is the organisers who advertise it.
What volunteering gets you, and what it asks
Web Summit runs a volunteer programme that trades work at the event for a free ticket. Volunteers do the things that keep a four-day conference upright: registration desks, walking speakers to stages, pointing lost people towards the right pavilion. In return, alongside the pass, the organisers promise access to the talks during time off.
So it is not a ticket you are given. It is a ticket you work, and it is worth turning up with that expectation. For anyone early in a tech career, or newly landed in Portugal and short on contacts, it is probably the cheapest way to spend four days among seventy thousand people in the industry — a figure that comes from Web Summit itself and appears on nearly every page it publishes.
Who is confirmed so far
The 2026 speaker list has the names you would expect. Matthew Prince of Cloudflare. Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian. Markus Villig, who founded Bolt. Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s executive vice-president for technological sovereignty.
Then there is everyone else, which says more about where Web Summit is pointing. Maria Sharapova. Thibaut Courtois, the Real Madrid goalkeeper, listed as an investor. James Vowles, team principal at Williams. Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist. The conference still calls itself a tech event, but the stage keeps filling up with sport and geopolitics.
The 2026 programme is organised across seventeen themed tracks, from venture capital to energy.
Worth it, given where the country stands
Portugal hosts Europe’s biggest technology event while it leads the EU on fibre and 5G and lags on the skills to use either, a gap that explains a good deal of the argument about the sector here.
If what you want is hands-on training rather than a stage, smaller and equally free options exist. In October, Braga hosts a two-day AI lab open to small and medium companies, with applications closing on the 16th.
Volunteer applications and ticket sales both run through the event’s official site. The MEO Arena is in Parque das Nações, a short walk from Oriente station — with seventy thousand visitors in town, the metro is the only sane way in.
Image: Web Summit
