diff --git a/backend/render-build.sh b/backend/render-build.sh
index 5ec39d5f..d4cbfb3c 100644
--- a/backend/render-build.sh
+++ b/backend/render-build.sh
@@ -9,15 +9,12 @@ IS_PODCAST_ONLY=false
 
 if [[ "$ENABLED_FEATURES" == "podcast" ]]; then
     IS_PODCAST_ONLY=true
-    echo "🔊 Podcast-only mode detected - skipping spaCy/NLTK model download"
-fi
-
-python -m pip install --retries 10 --timeout 120 -r requirements.txt
-
-# Download required NLTK and spaCy models during build phase (skip for podcast-only)
-if [[ "$IS_PODCAST_ONLY" == "false" ]]; then
+    echo "🔊 Podcast-only mode detected - using minimal requirements"
+    python -m pip install --retries 10 --timeout 120 -r requirements-podcast.txt
+else
+    echo "📦 Full mode - using all requirements"
+    python -m pip install --retries 10 --timeout 120 -r requirements.txt
+    # Download required NLTK and spaCy models during build phase (skip for podcast-only)
     python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
     python -m nltk.downloader punkt_tab stopwords averaged_perceptron_tagger
-else
-    echo "🔊 Skipping spaCy/NLTK download for podcast-only mode"
 fi
diff --git a/backend/requirements-podcast.txt b/backend/requirements-podcast.txt
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..1322b714
--- /dev/null
+++ b/backend/requirements-podcast.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+# Core dependencies
+fastapi>=0.115.14
+starlette>=0.40.0,<0.47.0
+sse-starlette<3.0.0
+uvicorn>=0.24.0
+uvicorn[standard]>=0.24.0
+gunicorn>=21.0.0
+
+# Server utilities
+python-multipart>=0.0.6
+python-dotenv>=1.0.0
+loguru>=0.7.2
+tenacity>=8.2.3
+pydantic>=2.5.2,<3.0.0
+typing-extensions>=4.8.0
+
+# Authentication
+PyJWT>=2.8.0
+cryptography>=41.0.0
+fastapi-clerk-auth>=0.0.7
+
+# Database
+sqlalchemy>=2.0.25
+
+# Payment
+stripe>=8.0.0
+
+# HTTP & API
+httpx>=0.27.2,<0.28.0
+
+# AI/ML (needed for podcast)
+openai>=1.3.0
+google-genai>=1.0.0
+
+# TTS for podcast
+gtts>=2.4.0
+pyttsx3>=2.90
+
+# Text processing
+markdown>=3.5.0
+
+# Data processing
+pandas>=2.0.0
+numpy>=1.24.0
+
+# Image/audio processing
+Pillow>=10.0.0
+huggingface_hub>=1.1.4
+
+# Video composition
+moviepy==2.1.2
+imageio>=2.31.0
+imageio-ffmpeg>=0.4.9
+
+# Testing
+pytest>=7.4.0
+pytest-asyncio>=0.21.0