bstract: The thermodynamic costs and limitations of measuring, erasing or cooling quantum systems have been studied within different paradigms. Projective measurements, perfect erasure or exact ground state cooling are of course limited by the third law of thermodynamics and cannot be achieved without infinite resources, which present differently in each paradigm. I will briefly cover some desirable properties of measurements and talk about notions of cooling beyond equilibrated systems. Then I will present a framework that unifies many approaches and allows to bound achievable cooling using general properties of the system used to refrigerate, giving insight into the relation between complexity, cooling and energy.