I dumped at&t two years ago when bill went over $200, been with TING ever since. Ting is À la carte, you only pay for what you use. With ATT I was racking up 15000 useless roll over mins!
With ting you can buy either a Verizon or a Sprint phone and use that network. My bill for 3 phones went from $200 to $70, average but I do not use a bunch of data either. But since I do not use a lot of data, no reason to pay for a huge data plan!
The only cheaper phones plans are republic wireless which uses sprint and also uses Voice over wifi technology. but those plans are for guys who want smart phones, but do not want to pay for any data.