diff --git a/Dockerfile b/Dockerfile
index 89ed8c0..12b0e62 100644
--- a/Dockerfile
+++ b/Dockerfile
@@ -21,7 +21,20 @@ WORKDIR /app
 # image-search fallback (see requirements.txt); run `playwright install
 # chromium` in the container if you need that specific fallback tier.
 COPY requirements.txt .
+
+# torch is installed FIRST, from PyTorch's CPU-only index, and that ordering is
+# the point. sentence-transformers pulls torch in transitively, and pip's
+# default wheel for Linux bundles the entire CUDA stack - cuBLAS, cuDNN, NVRTC,
+# Triton - because it cannot know the target has no GPU. Measured in this image
+# it was 2.7GB of nvidia/ plus 691MB of triton/, none of which can ever execute
+# on a CPU-only VPS, in a 9.2GB image on a 48GB disk shared with a dozen
+# services. A build here has already failed once on "no space left on device".
+#
+# Installing it up front means the requirements.txt pass below finds torch
+# already satisfied and leaves it alone. Keep these two steps in this order.
 RUN python -m venv /opt/venv \
+    && /opt/venv/bin/pip install --no-cache-dir \
+       --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cpu torch \
     && /opt/venv/bin/pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
 
 
diff --git a/requirements.txt b/requirements.txt
index ffa93d6..6783c53 100644
--- a/requirements.txt
+++ b/requirements.txt
@@ -52,7 +52,13 @@ aiofiles>=23.2.1
 # Playwright (Python) - last-resort image-search fallback only.
 # Run `playwright install chromium` once after pip install to enable it;
 # the pipeline works fine without it (just one fewer fallback source).
-playwright>=1.47.0
+# playwright>=1.47.0
+# Commented out, not deleted. It is the last-resort image-search tier, and the
+# Dockerfile never installs its browser binary - so in a container the tier is
+# skipped at runtime no matter what, while the package still costs 137MB. The
+# import is lazy (app/services/playwright_image_fallback.py does it inside the
+# function), so its absence is handled on the existing "not installed" path.
+# Uncomment, and run `playwright install chromium`, if you ever want that tier.
 
 # --- S3 / DigitalOcean Spaces (optional product image storage) ---
 boto3>=1.34.162