Count subscribers of a topic in Firebase Cloud Messaging

What I want to do with my app is this: users can select different interests and as soon as there are more than ~5 people interested in the same thing, I want to send them a notification.

I thought Firebase + Topics would be a good choice for this.

But how do I find out how many people have subscribed to a topic?

There is no available API to check how many subscribers a topic has. (see my answer here)

You'll have to implement the mapping on your server-side, saving the name of the topics and adding in the list of subscribers. Upon subscription, add the new subscriber, check the count (see if it's within your preferred number), then trigger a notification.