What would happen if I got rid of the starttransaction / commit? I was concerned that this would result in a transaction being created for every entity that I try to save... is this the case?
No, no StartTransactions would be used if you don't specify so.
From a database point of view every command is executed in an emplicit transaction, unless you explicitly started a transaction, and then you should take responsibility of commiting it or rolling it back.
Don't use transactions unless you need them, for example if you want to Insert an Order and its Order details but you want the entire transaction either to succeed or to fail. In this case you should use a Transaction, which should be commited or Rolledback accordingly.
LLBLGen Pro emplicitly uses Transactions for saving a graph of objects and/or entityCollections.
