Complete My Bundle Pricing
App Bundles and Complete My Bundle both seem like reasonable additions to the app store, ways to encourage repeat customers and to reward loyal customers. Maybe not as good as upgrade pricing, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.
Unfortunately, Complete My Bundle has a pricing problem. The price you pay to complete your bundle is the bundle price minus whatever you've paid for any of the apps you already own in that bundle. That sounds totally reasonable in simple scenarios, but it gets complicated quickly if you bought applications that were on sale at the time or received an app through a promo code. Where it goes from complicated to counter-intuitive is when the price to complete the bundle can be more than the cost to buy all oustanding applications in the bundle.
As a result, Apple has written a FAQ to explain how Complete My Bundle works and Panic has written a blog post explaining their bundle pricing, the variability inherent in it, and an example of when completing the bundle is more expensive than buying the outstanding applications. Clearly, this has gone from being a benefit to being a potential annoyance.
Sure, a user could sum the cost of the apps they haven't yet bought within a bundle and compare that to the cost that Apple is offering to complete the bundle. But it sure would be nice if the computer they were using at the time would do that same math automatically. There's no reason why Apple shouldn't do that same math and offer the user the lower of the two prices in order to complete the bundle, removing the need to have this conversation.
Do it properly, Apple. Do the math so that no-one ever has to guess which price is cheaper for them, so that they know that "Complete My Bundle" will never cost them more than buying the apps individually.