Cost conscious garbage collection, including: selecting one or more storage classes from among a plurality of storage classes of one or more data storage services for storing one or more data objects; determining, for the one or more data objects stored in the one or more data storage services, an estimated quantity of data eligible for garbage collection; and initiating, after determining that resources for continued storage of the one or more data objects exceed resources for performing garbage collection on the data eligible for garbage collection and based upon an expected cost savings based on storage cost savings from performing garbage collection compared against access cost expenses for performing one or more cloud-based operations to perform the garbage collection, garbage collection on the one or more data objects in the one or more data storage services.