Okay, so how much could a player expect to pay for a paracritter along the lines of a Barghest or Hellhound? I'd imagine they'd be legally obtainable with the right (fake) license, as they are used as guard critters. So how much would a PC be charged for one? A high end purebred dog is $3,000, and I'd imagine it'd be more expensive for a Awakened critter, so how does 5,000¥ sound? I'd imagine basic Animal Handling checks would remain in effect, albeit not super difficult ones.

go check the 4A Paracritter Book (in German Wildwechsel)
You get detailed Prices for trained, untrined Critters (awakened and Mundane) and also rules and cost for Training them
And IIRC ist way more (in the RAnge of 25.000 - 50.000 ¥ because they're so rare and difficult to train, but go check it Yourself
)

with an untrained Dance
Medicineman

Running Wild is the book you want and the bits on trained para critters starts on pg 32, game rules wise. As per your example, an untrained Hell hound is 10,000¥ with a 15R availability. That is untrained. Also usually infertile so you can't breed up your own litters of hell hound pups.
If this is for 5th ed, then just multiply the costs by 3 to 5 to bring it in line with how much more ridiculously expensive everything is in 5th ed.

Page 35 of Running Wild has a table that tells you how to calculate training costs. It uses a hellhound as an example.

Base price is ¥10,000 for a hellhound, ¥11,000 for a barghest. Availability 15R for each.

Both have a Willpower of 4 in SR5, which multiplies the cost of a trained animal by 2.

Then you have to pick the level of training, which determines the last cost multiplier:
Instinctive - 1.25x
Basic - 2x
Moderate - 5x
Advanced - 7x
Against Instincts - 10x

So a minimally-trained "probably won't eat you but probably won't listen either" hellhound would cost ¥10,000 x 2 x 1.25 = ¥25,000.

A fully-trained "against instincts" hellhound that will run into a hail of gunfire at your command would cost ¥10,000 x 2 x 10 = ¥200,000.

Running Wild also has rules for training animals yourself, if you have the appropriate Animal Handling skills.

I wouldn't increase the prices for SR5. These seem very fair to me.

That's honestly nuts. Having read the rules for it, a trained Hellhound with a Willpower of 2 costs 100,000¥. And to be effective, a corp will need multiple. No corp is gonna do that. It'd be cheaper to contract a mage to have a spirit on the premises. Honestly, the costs seem straight up absurd.

Keep in mind here, the book has awakened critters as a "budget" option for magical security. So, theoretically, it should be cheaper than having a mage or two on the premises. Now, there are no stats on how much mages get paid, but I'd say an Aspected Summoner would make about 50k a year, give or take. A pack of five Hellhounds costs 500k, and lasts about a decade before the dogs are too old to work. It seems even, but you also have to pay the Hellhound handler (which I'd imagine is at least 30k a year) and if one of the Hellhounds croaks, you're down 100,000¥, but if your salaried mage dies, you can just hire a new one.

And that's assuming low Willpower. Higher Willpower means higher modifiers, meaning a top shelf Hellhound is 1.5 million nuyen. That's madness. I'd rather use my own system than use this.

Edit: Oh, so the Willpower is fixed, meaning that it's 200,000¥ per 'hound. My point still stands.

What can we say?

ParaFido has a better Union than the Runners do and as such get paid better.

I'm pretty sure that for 5e that summoner should cost way more, given that it takes ~100k to slot some decent wired reflexes into a chump security guard.

Mind you, I'm fully prepared to expect that it doesn't. It's Shadowrun 5, after all, where the math doesn't matter and the prices are made up.

I would actually see a competent mage pulling a fair amount of Nuyen down from a AAA Corp.... High Lifestyle and perks. So that is a minimum of 120,000/Year for lifestyle alone, plus a few perks. Say 150,000-180,000/Year

As a corper (both IRL and hypothetically in 2078), I would absolutely pay a competent mage a High lifestyle.

Running Wild does say that paranormal animals are "expensive options to security." The book discusses a lot of the pros and cons on both sides of the calculation.

As I said earlier, if the nuyen is a stumbling block then use the animal training rules. I've had two different PCs use them over the years and they worked well. Plus, it gives a better sense of ownership (plus the development of the relationship) than just handing over a credstick.

Of course the prices are made up. It's a game. The whole world is made up.

And don't forget that this is the cost to a typical end user. If you're a bio-tech corp, or an animal training corp, then your actual costs are massively lower once you strip out profit margins and such like. And most of the AAAs will have corps that perform these services. Add in the muscle for buying bulk, and prices drop dramatically. In a corporate environment, it's common to see up to 50% reduction in list prices for goods with very little effort. As an individual, that's often very hard to achieve.

As an example, the company I used to work for (computer sales and services) got a 48% discount on all internal Cisco switches and access points for our own use, and for our demo lab. Made stuff very easy to justify cost wise against the other vendors, and of course meant we're showing Cisco kit out to clients. I can't imagine that sort of thinking wouldn't still be pervasive in the Shadowrun world.

As to the cost Vs a mage... well, you buy a critter once, and then only have generally minimal costs to maintain it. 200K to buy a well trained hellhound? Sure, then it's 1000 a year for kibble, and all the runners it can eat.
A mage is going to want his princely salary every year, + inflation, + expenses. It doesn't take long to get a good ROI on critters when you start looking at 10-20 year terms.
And that's before you get into the fact that Thompson (Industrial) does have to pay 200k for their critters to Thompson (Security), meaning only 1% profits this year - oh, and no tax due. In turn Thompson (Security) of course buys their critters from Thompson (Acqusitions) a company registered in Hong Kong, and we all know what that means to taxes...

This actually makes sense. It still doesn't help the PCs any, though, as I have every anticipation that their pet will get geeked pretty quickly. It's not like Hellhounds have armor.

I would say, given the way megas work, that it is not 100k to put wires in corpsec drones. For starters, they own the 'ware clinic and probably the manufacturer and distributor. So they lose a chunk of profit margin, but they put their corpsec into 50k worth of debt. That drone is now a vastly superior employee, and is stuck working for that corp for the foreseeable future. It inspires loyalty, devours the paycheque of their employees, and provides better service in their assigned profession.

Giving discounted, job performance enhancing services that are still outside their normal pay grade just makes sense. It essentially means the corp is buying the individual for the at-cost price of whatever they give the employee. So 'wared up corporate goons make a lot of sense to me.

As for paracritters, bear in mind these are the prices for you, as a civilian, to get and train these. The price of a military trained German Shepard at prime age is around 30 000, generally. However, as a farm boy growing up, the price for me to own and train a king Shepard (not that well, but to the point he went where I pointed and did what I asked, including scaring off coyotes or pushing open gates while I led the horses. He was a good dog...) was probably, including vet bills over the last few years, maybe (absolute upper limit) 10 thousand over 12 years. Taking into account the transportation infrastructure the corps could apply to the exotic locations, and the facilities they already own to breed and train them, the price-per-hellhound would be closer to 15 000 per fully trained hound at the point of completed training. This is of course after building the facilities and hiring trainers. But those costs drop drastically as time goes on and they have refined the process and start breeding the paracritters, providing a steady stream of highly profitable "products" for sale.

That's just my impressions based on the setting. For any price in the book, divide that cost by 5-10 for any hard goods (the lower end of that spectrum is 'ware, because taking someone into surgery and installing things takes a long time and unavoidable non-reusable costs), and 15 for services, whenever you're looking at the cost to the corp. Things are cheap as all hell when you have infrastructure and staff on hand to make it happen.