Microsoft Defender for Cloud AMA

Great question! The foundational CSPM capabilities will stay free, with Defender CSPM generally available (GA), the plan will remain free until billing starts on May 1 2023. Billing will apply for compute, database, and storage resources. Billable workloads will be VMs, Storage Accounts, OSS DBs, and SQL PaaS & Servers on Machines. When billing starts, existing Microsoft Defender for Cloud customers will receive automatically applied discounts for Defender CSPM. Microsoft Defender CSPM protects across all your multicloud workloads, but billing only applies for Servers, Databases and Storage accounts at $15/billable resource/month.

If you have one of the following plans enabled, you will receive a discount. Current Microsoft Defender for Cloud customers receive automatically applied discounts (5-25% discount per billed workload based on the highest applicable discount).

Refer to the following table:

Current Defender for Cloud Customer Automatic Discount Defender CSPM Price

Defender for Servers P2 -  25% discount - cost: $11.25/ Compute or Data workload / month
Defender for Containers -  10% discount - cost $13.50/ Compute or Data workload / month
Defender for DBs / Defender for Storage -  5% discount - cost $14.25/ Compute or Data workload / month

and to find more pricing information, please see this pricing page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/defender-for-cloud/