When I bought my Nexus 7 in October, I looked into what my options are for getting on the net with it. I called VZW and asked how I could tether it, with my plan. I am on an old plan with grandfathered unlimited data and am using a galaxy nexus. The rep told me that I could tether as much as I want and I quote, "We strongly suggest that you purchase the Verizon tethering plan, however, you may tether your device using whatever method you wish. We advise against using other methods because we cannot guarantee the service will work unless it is our product."
I thanked him for his time and purchased FoxFi immediately. Since then, I went from averaging 2-4GB/month to 20-30GB. foxfi worked flawlessly. I recently got sick of the sluggishness of my phone and decided to install a custom ROM (ShinyROM, 4.4.2) and root it. Now, every time I try to use FoxFi I get this message:
"Almost there... an extra step is needed on this phone. Please select "Go to Settings" below and turn on "Mobile Hotspot" within 30 seconds. From there you can also configure hotspot settings such as network name and password."
After going through those annoying steps every time I wanted to tether, I decided to see if I could just use the tether option without FoxFi... yep, it worked exactly the same, just without the FoxFi middleman.
I'm pretty sure I didn't have the tethering option in settings before (or at least couldn't turn it on). I'm not sure if a stock ROM would work differently, but now I use Power Toggle (needs root) to activate it and I have a toggle on my homescreen to turn on/off the native tethering app.