Methods and apparatus for differential bandwidth metering in a network implementing direct peerings. A system includes a plurality of resource collections and a billing manager. The billing manager obtains a first metric of network traffic transmitted on behalf of a client to obtain one or more services from one or more resource collections. The billing manager also obtains a second metric of network traffic transmitted on behalf of the client over one or more private links, where each private link is set up to establish a network path between a respective client network of the client and a respective resource collection of the plurality of resource collections. The billing manager provides composite billing information to the client comprising a differential billing amount dependent upon a difference between the first metric and the second metric.