diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 1905419f3..37a89d993 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ and this project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0
 
 ### Bug Fixes
 
+* **deps:** move `gunicorn` to `[proxy-prod]` extra with `sys_platform != 'win32'` guard; removed from `[proxy]` to avoid forcing a Unix-only package on dev, CI, and Windows users ([#537](https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom/pull/537))
 * **startup:** suppress proxy startup log noise — litellm banner, trafilatura parse errors, HuggingFace Hub unauthenticated warnings, tiktoken fallback warning, and httpx INFO lines from sentence_transformers HEAD checks. Affected files: `headroom/providers/litellm.py`, `headroom/transforms/html_extractor.py`, `headroom/memory/adapters/embedders.py`, `headroom/providers/anthropic.py`, `headroom/providers/registry.py`, `headroom/image/onnx_router.py`, `headroom/transforms/kompress_compressor.py`.
 
 
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 57aa61389..06cbf2801 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -71,6 +71,14 @@ proxy = [
     "watchdog>=4.0.0",            # File watcher for live code graph reindexing (--code-graph)
     "sqlite-vec>=0.1.6",          # Vector index for memory (--memory). Lightweight, no torch.
 ]
+# Production ASGI/WSGI server — Unix-only (gunicorn does not support Windows).
+# Kept separate from [proxy] so that dev, CI, and Windows users are not forced
+# to install a non-functional package.  Production deployments should use:
+#   pip install headroom-ai[proxy,proxy-prod]
+proxy-prod = [
+    "headroom-ai[proxy]",
+    "gunicorn>=21.0.0; sys_platform != 'win32'",
+]
 # AST-based code compression (tree-sitter)
 code = [
     "tree-sitter-language-pack>=0.10.0",
diff --git a/uv.lock b/uv.lock
index 2ce74fff3..e6c103187 100644
--- a/uv.lock
+++ b/uv.lock
@@ -1200,7 +1200,7 @@ wheels = [
 
 [[package]]
 name = "gitpython"
-version = "3.1.47"
+version = "3.1.46"
 source = { registry = "https://pypi.org/simple/" }
 dependencies = [
     { name = "gitdb" },