"It's like the airlines charging for drinks. ... One started, and then the others started," Gold said. "If Verizon gets away with it, everyone's going to do it."

However, another analyst called it a risky move. Users who were looking forward to the Rogue "are not going to be very pleased with these new data plan requirements, especially when other carriers impose no restrictions on similar devices to their users," said ABI Research analyst Deepa Karthikeyan.

The service providers may be looking for more of the bonanza they've reaped with smartphones, profiting not so much on the subsidized device price but on larger monthly service bills, Castonguay said.

The way the new, low-end data plans are priced, Verizon might stand to make a good return. For example, at $9.99 per month for 25MB of data, subscribers will be paying nearly $0.40 per megabyte. Those who go over the monthly limit on that plan will pay $0.50 for every extra megabyte. Then again, the monthly outlay is smaller than for the unlimited smartphone plan.

How much a given consumer could do with 25MB data is hard to tell because there are so many different ways they could use it, analysts say. Verizon's Raney said downloading the carrier's VZ Navigator application would take 2MB and on average, viewing 100 pages on the mobile Web would be 3MB.