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Adding a vendor

How to add a vendor to your workspace, what auto-detection does, and what to do when it fails.

Adding a vendor is the first thing you do in Thorgate. The process is designed to be quick — paste the vendor's primary URL, let auto-detection do the work, edit anything it got wrong.

Steps

  1. Click "Add Vendor" from the Vendors page or the dashboard.
  2. Paste the vendor's primary URL — usually their homepage or marketing site (e.g. https://stripe.com).
  3. Click Detect. Thorgate will fetch the homepage and look for links to:
    • Privacy policy
    • Terms of service
    • Data Processing Agreement
    • Subprocessor list
    • Security or trust page
  4. Review the detected URLs. Some will be filled in; others won't. Edit any that look wrong, and add any that auto-detection missed.
  5. Set the display name (optional). This is a per-account override — useful if your team refers to the vendor by an internal name.
  6. Save the vendor. Thorgate queues an initial crawl of each tracked document.

The first crawl typically completes within a minute or two. After it finishes, the vendor appears on your Vendors page and the documents are visible on the vendor detail page.

When auto-detection fails

Common reasons auto-detection misses a document:

  • The vendor doesn't link to it from their homepage. Some vendors put DPAs only in their legal hub or behind a contact form.
  • The link uses unusual anchor text. "Data Practices" instead of "Privacy" — auto-detection has heuristics but isn't perfect.
  • The document is behind a marketing form. Auto-detection cannot bypass forms; you'll need to manually find and paste the public URL.
  • The document is hosted on a different domain. Some vendors use a separate trust domain (trust.example.com); auto-detection follows external links cautiously.

If auto-detection fails for a document, the simplest fix is to manually search the vendor's site and paste the URL into the appropriate field on the Add Vendor or Edit Vendor form.

Using the catalog suggester

If the vendor has been added to Thorgate by another customer, autocomplete will suggest the canonical entry as you type the URL or vendor name. Selecting a catalog suggestion gives you:

  • Pre-populated document URLs that have been crawled before.
  • An immediate first version (no waiting for the initial crawl).
  • Shared monitoring with other customers tracking the same vendor — meaning more reliable change detection.

You can still set a per-account display name and override the canonical name for your team.

What gets tracked

Each vendor can have up to five tracked documents:

  • Privacy policy
  • Terms of service
  • Data processing agreement (DPA)
  • Subprocessor list
  • Security / trust page

You don't have to add all five. A vendor without a public DPA, for example, will simply not have that document tracked.

Vendor limits

Each plan has a vendor limit (Starter: 25, Pro: 60, Scale: 150). Exceeding the limit prevents adding new vendors but doesn't affect tracking of existing ones. If you need to track more, upgrade your plan or remove vendors you no longer use.

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