Comment by spmurrayzzz

You definitely can (and should) peer as a small ISP, even if you are buying transit from other providers. This is especially true if you're running an MPLS headend as you'll still have choke points at L2 circuits in your own network. Owning your own peering can be a great way to offload traffic to other circuits that share destinations, most commonly traffic destined for VOD/streaming CDNs.

(N.B. — This is what has worked well for the WISP I cofounded, but YMMV depending on headend infra).