It was proved in Forti and Schwaiger (C R Math Acad Sci Soc R Can 11(6):215–220, 1989), Schwaiger (Aequ Math 35:120–121, 1988) and with different methods in Schwaiger (Developments in functional equations and related topics. Selected papers based on the presentations at the 16th international conference on functional equations and inequalities, ICFEI, Bȩdlewo, Poland, May 17–23, 2015, Springer, Cham, pp 275–295, 2017) that under the assumption that every function defined on suitable abelian semigroups with values in a normed space such that the norm of its Cauchy difference is bounded by a constant (function) is close to some additive function, i.e., the norm of the difference between the given function and that additive function is also bounded by a constant, the normed space must necessarily be complete. By Schwaiger (Ann Math Sil 34:151–163, 2020) this is also true in the non-archimedean case. Here we discuss the situation when the bound is a suitable non-constant function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]