Agreed most of the laterites have a low in ground value per tonne, which doesn't give much wiggle room with the process costs.
If you have to leach at high temps using concentrated acids, the reagents can even end up costing more than the value of the metals.
There are a number of lateritic type deposits that are relying on co-products to get over that issue.
The obvious ones are CLQ and AUZ (I think) who will get big Scandium credits, but their production would cause massive oversupply in the Scandium markets, a price crash and perhaps make their deposits marginal again.
There are others that are going way left field, with HPA, which I think is safer from a supply/demand perspective, but has some
complex processing requirements. (and also expensive reagents)
