Does anyone know of a solution for checking if a tweet has replies or not, without checking the reply_count field of the JSON response? 
I'm building a crawler and already have a method for scraping a timeline for tweets as well as replies to tweets. In order to increase efficiency I want to find out if a tweet has any replies at all before calling my reply method. I have a standard developer account with Twitter so I do not have access to reply_count.
Looking for this as well. Only way I found was scraping the page (which is against the Terms of Service)
reply-count-aria-${tweet.id_str}.*?(\d+) replies
Is there a workaround for non-premium Twitter developers for getting reply_count?